I didn’t understand. But I was beginning to think there was something odd going on.
I got another bag of juice and pushed the straw into it without waiting for him to ask. He drank that one down too, then moved to a chair, sitting back like he’d just finished running a marathon or something.
“What’s going on? What is that thing?”
He looked at the device in his hand like he’d forgotten it was there. He held it up, turned so that I could see that the number was now a fifty-nine and the arrow was gone.
“It’s a continuous glucose monitor.”
“Glucose?”
He nodded. “I’m diabetic. Have been since I was six.”
I don’t know why it surprised me, but it did. I studied him, searching him for something that I’d missed before. I don’t know what I expected to see, but I felt like there should be some physical sign. Something that should have told me that he wasn’t all he appeared to be.
He sat up a little and pulled his shirt out of his pants. “Do you want to see?” he asked even as he lifted the shirt up high enough that it revealed washboard abs and two odd looking objects attached to his belly. One was about the size of a half dollar, a white piece of gauze with a clear plastic thing attached to a long, thin tube. The other was roughly the same size, but it was thicker, heavier. And it wasn’t attached to anything.
“Insulin pump,” he said, flicking his finger against the first item. “Glucose transmitter,” he said, touching the other.
I was at a loss for words. I don’t know where I was going, but I got up and headed toward the door. He grabbed me just as my hand touched the knob, and spun me around.
“Does it make me weak in your eyes?”
“What?” I was startled. I didn’t know what to say.
“Does it make me weak? Less of a man?”
“I… No, it doesn’t. But you should have told me.”
“Why?”
I started to shake my head, but he ran his hand over my throat and grabbed my jaw, forcing my head still.
“Some women think it’s a weakness. An infirmity. Like I’m not really a man because I have a chronic illness that can knock me flat on my ass at any moment.” He ran his thumb over my bottom lip. “Do you think that?”
I thought about a man I’d served with. I’d visited him in the VA hospital a few months after I left the Army. He’d been injured when a grenade went off too close to him as he walked his patrol one night. Shrapnel damaged his leg so badly that it had to be amputated. His wife hadn’t been to the hospital to see him because he couldn’t stand the idea that she might look at him differently.
“You don’t need a leg to be a man.”
I’d meant it. And I meant it when I touched the side of Lucien’s face and said, “If you think this makes you less of a man, then your definition of masculinity and mine are two very different things.”
He stared at me for a long moment, like he couldn’t wrap his mind around what I’d just said. And then his mouth was on mine, and I slid my arms around his neck, buried my fingers in his hair, and pulled him tight against me.
We kissed roughly, lips mashing and teeth getting in the way. His hands moved low over my hips, and he lifted me, pulling up against the smooth wood of the door until we were face to face. I wrapped my legs around his waist, clinging to him as the material of my dress betrayed me by sliding up over my thighs, exposing my upper thighs to his touch. And touch he did, running his hands over the silky material of my new panties, his fingertips brushing places they never should have known.
I didn’t know much about Lucien. I didn’t know anything about this girlfriend who’d apparently broken his heart. I didn’t know why he hadn’t brought any other women home in the past few years. I didn’t know what his favorite color was, if he liked music, if he watched movies late at night when he couldn’t sleep. But I knew he was a damn good kisser and he was doing a service to humanity in his work. And I knew he was as masculine as any man I’d served with in the military.
I knew that I shouldn’t want this. I shouldn’t want his touch. But I also knew that his touch did things to my body that made me forget that I shouldn’t want this.